I hadn’t been back to look at West Cabanne Place, platted in 1888, in a while, so I thought I would go take a look and check up on it. I first explored the street back in August of 2009, and revisited the Theodore Link House in September of 2014 and August of 2019. In May of 2019, I featured a few historic photographs of houses on the street. It is interesting to see how most of the houses look the same but with a little wear and tear in the last sixteen years.
Many houses have begun to lose appendages, such as the porch above.
As the street began to lose its cache, houses became smaller, like we see above.
These two houses were some of the last built on the street, probably in the 1920s or even the 30s.
This house below is a survivor, as many of these shingle style houses were demolished either to be replaced with more substantial brick houses or during urban renewal.
Interestingly, fire insurance maps show that there were many more wood frame houses in 1908, but they are gone now, replaced with more brick houses from the 1910s and 20s.
The house below was abandoned and I think in foreclosure when we first looked at it. Now occupied, it has not taken on a more varied paint scheme as it would have originally possessed.
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The 2nd house from the top was the family home of my dad, Tom Ruoff. His family moved in during the mid-1940s when he was just starting 8th grade. Yes, the porch came down in recent years, but thankfully the house was renovated a couple years ago after falling into disrepair and becoming vacant. While I was never inside as my grandparents moved before I was born, I’ve fond memories of the turreted red brick home several pictures down. A good friend from Rosati-Kain High School lived there! I think another home I’ve visited (belongs to a friend of a friend) also made the cut. A small home with a distinctive asymmetrical front (11th picture down) was built by the owners of the larger home next door (not shown) for one of their children, according to dad, who knew a lot of local history. As I recall, there’s an architectural resemblance between the two. I recognize virtually all the houses shown since dad loved taking his six kids back to his old haunts from our home in Richmond Heights. My family is white, and when my grandparents downsized to the St. Regis in the Central West End around 1960, they sold their home to a younger mixed-race couple they’d become friends with through a St. Louis Archdiocese program that promoted integration during the “white flight” era. Like my grandparents when they lived in the West End, this couple belonged to the now-closed St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church and sent their kids to the parish school. So did my friend’s family; yes, they were friends with the family living in dad’s old home! In fact, the same archdiocesan program prompted my friend’s family, who is white, to uproot from Florissant to the West End — a reversal of the “white flight” tide. Several years before dad’s death in 2019 at age 87, my friend told me about a Cabanne Place block party. (Dad usually dropped the “West.”) Her family had moved but was going. Dad and a friend who lived there back in his day went, too. Dad had such a ball! Because it was connected to his past, the memory stuck with him even though he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I’m not sure if the older gentleman who’d lived in his childhood home for years attended, but whenever dad knocked on his door on visits to the neighborhood, he was greeted with a smile and given a tour of the yard. While Cabanne Place homes have for the most part been maintained and some renovated, it was sad to see the many deteriorated buildings or vacant lots in the West End on visits with dad. Yet he was an infectiously positive person. He was grateful that Cabanne Place remained an anchor and welcomed the restoration and preservation efforts about the area in recent decades, as do I. On my next visit home (I live in Maine), I hope to knock on the door of the new keepers of his family home. No doubt he’ll be knocking in spirit!
Wow, thanks for sharing. This is really interesting to know.